Aetherweb's Blog

Our servers automatically warn by PushBullet, Email and SMS whenever disk space hits some threshold warning level, which is handy. If you’re reading this you’re probably aware that when a server’s primary disk becomes completely full, the server becomes inoperable. A situation best avoided! An issue though is that this alert can come at any time – and if disk … Read More

We have a lot of websites behind CloudFlare’s excellent firewall system. Sometimes we need to move a server to a new IP address necessitating the manual modification of a large number of CloudFlare DNS records in a large number of CloudFlare Zones. CloudFlare is great in that if you modify a DNS record the effect is immediate – so a … Read More

I added a spam whitelist rule to the file on my WHM/cPanel server: File: New rule in place: I added this because a lot of mail from ‘a-special-domain-name.co.uk’ was being tagged as spam and disappearing. But in a daily cron task, cPanel went ahead and removed the rule automatically and emailed me about it: How annoying! It turns out that … Read More

CloudFlare offer the option to provide SSL for your website without the hassle or expense of obtaining an SSL certificate. It really is quite a hassle and it’s definitely expensive (relatively) so this is brilliant, especially as Google do rate an SSL site higher than a non-SSL one. All you have to do is put your site behind CloudFlare and … Read More

I’m running ConfigServer Firewall with its associated LFD (Login Failure Daemon) on one of my servers. LFD I believe does much the same job as cPHulk but advice I found online suggests that if resources aren’t hogged then enable both for a stronger setup. cPHulk has (in the CPanel/WHM control panel) an option to run an external command when an … Read More

I used to try to remember every day to log in to my server and check if there were any manual updates needed (these can be kernel updates etc etc) by running this command: This outputs the list of mirrors and then a list of any packages with updates available for them. Problem is it’s a bit of a pain … Read More

In my last post I talked about how to automatically add IP blocks to CloudFlare from your own server. I also talked about the problem that could lead to, which is potentially 1000s of IP blocks mounting up over time (leading to firewall performance issues, and hitting your CloudFlare IP block limit). I mulled over the best solution to this … Read More

Unfortunately, having mod_cloudflare installed on ones server does not mean that the server’s front-end firewall (ConfigServer Firewall in one instance for me) sees the correct remote IP address for requests routed via CloudFlare. It appears mod_cloudflare (which is after all an Apache ‘mod’) works great for applications querying the REMOTE_ADDR server value from within Apache, but in many cases the … Read More

A website I manage has recently been targeted with a DDoS (Distributed Denial Of Service Attack). The PHP code on the site was already logging access (as is normal) but I wanted a simple way to respond to excessive access from any particular IP other than using a coded denial of response in the website’s code because while this does … Read More

There’s a handy way to knock all distributed SMTP AUTH attacks on the head by switching off the advertising of SMTP AUTH to all but specified IP addresses and IP address ranges. It works perfectly. For details on how to achieve this on a WHM/cPanel server, see here: http://sysadmintips.in/advanced/csf/exim Great! However there’s a problem. Many many people like to use … Read More

I would highly recommend Jeff for all your website needs. He is knowledgeable, experienced, quick and fairly priced. Moving our website to Aetherweb from a large London based agency has saved us thousands of pounds per year while delivering a far superior and more attentive serviceread more

We are very pleased with our website. Jeff was great to work with and as a complete novice he explained everything in detail. We also love our logo designed by Vanessa. Would highly recommend Aetherweb Ltd and indeed already have!read more

Jeff did a great job on our website - so much so i recommended him to a friend of ours and they used him for their website too. Jeff was very reliable, responded quickly to any of our requests and the quality of the finished product was exactly what we asked for. I would highly recommend Aetherweb (Jeff) for any website design requirements.read more